Eos, Vol. 90, No. 50, 15 December 2009
FORUM
A New Approach to Data Publication
in Ocean Sciences
PAGE 484
Data are collected from ocean sciences
activities that range from a single investigator working in a laboratory to large teams of
scientists cooperating on big, multinational,
global ocean research projects. What
these activities have in common is that all
result in data, some of which are used as
the basis for publications in peer-­reviewed
journals.
However, two major problems regarding
data remain. First, many data valuable for
understanding ocean physics, chemistry,
geology, biology, and how the oceans operate in the Earth system are never archived
or made accessible to other scientists. Data
underlying traditional journal articles are
often difficult to obtain. Second, when scientists do contribute data to databases,
their data become freely available, with little acknowledgment and no contribution
to their career advancement. To address
these problems, stronger ties must be made
between data repositories and academic
journals, and a “digital backbone” needs
to be created for data related to journal
publications.
references citable in papers that use the
data, and in authors’ curricula vitae.
Getting Journals on Board
Several journals in the ocean sciences
already welcome the publication of data
briefs. They include Marine Micropaleontology; Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems;
Ecological Archives; and Earth System Science Data.
Other journals also acknowledge the benefits of submitting the data underlying traditional publications to approved databases.
In 1993, AGU first established its “Policy on
Referencing Data in and Archiving Data for
AGU Publications” (see http://​w ww​.agu​.org/​
pubs/​­policies/​data​_­policy​.shtml). The policy emphasizes the importance for authors
to submit data that are the basis for their
papers to a recognized data archive. It also
states AGU’s commitment to ensuring the
long-­term archiving and protection of data.
Data sets associated with articles are available at http://​w ww​.agu​.org/​pubs/
​­esupp​_browse​.html, and access to these
data does not require membership in AGU
or subscription to an AGU journal.
Links Between Data Repositories
and Academic Journals
The Scientific Committee on Oceanic
Research (SCOR) and the International
Oceanographic Data and Information
Exchange (IODE) of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s Intergovernmental Oceanographic
Commission (IOC) are discussing how to
provide better access to ocean data through
increased submission to approved, open,
online resources. Such new infrastructure
and new approaches to data publication
could help scientists who observe the ocean
and model its processes. Most important, it
is now timely to
increase the availability of data used to
create figures, tables, and statistical analyses in traditional journal articles;
reinforce linkages between data lodged
in data centers and science publications,
particularly “data briefs”; and
encourage the publishing of journals
that specialize in “data publications” or
“data briefs.”
Data publications are short descriptions (as short as a few paragraphs of text),
not interpretations, of data sets. They provide persistent pointers to the data in
an approved data repository as well as
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Fig. 1. Suggested work flow for peer-­reviewed data publications in the ocean sciences. Image
modified from Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research/International Oceanographic
Data and Information Exchange [2008]. At the end point of this flowchart are freely available peer-reviewed papers and data sets.
Eos, Vol. 90, No. 50, 15 December 2009
Submission of data associated with journal publications is a standard practice in
other domains, such as molecular biology, in which the gene sequences that are
described in peer-­reviewed publications
must be submitted to GenBank or related
archives. To help make such submissions
standard in the ocean sciences, SCOR and
IODE are working with editors and publishers of journals to discuss how to implement
greater use of data publication.
Building a Digital Backbone
To archive and administer data related
to journal publications, additional infrastructure in data management systems is
required. Such infrastructure must be implemented with minimal costs to avoid impeding the publication process (see Figure 1).
The “­eRepository” technology developed by
the digital library community delivers some
of the functionality needed for this infrastructure. However, it does not provide added
value—in terms of harmonization with other
data in the system, quality control, and metadata enhancement—associated with the
IODE network of national data centers.
A workable compromise would be to use
eRepository technology as “front-end” processes of data centers that serve ingested
data sets “as is” in the short term, as well as
providing added value to data sets through
existing data management infrastructure in
the medium and long terms. This new infrastructure should improve the data publication review process through closer collaboration between data centers and journal
editors.
SCOR and IODE are working with existing
data centers, libraries, and journals to promote the development of the infrastructure
required to provide ocean sciences publications with an effective “digital backbone.”
Other groups are also spearheading efforts
to link academic journals to data repositories. Ongoing cooperative activities are
along three lines:
1. SCOR and IODE are continuing to
work with editors of ocean science journals
to establish pilot projects along the lines
described in Figure 1.
2. The Marine Biological Laboratory/
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
(WHOI) library is working with the U.S. Biological and Chemical Oceanography Data
Management Office (BCO/DMO) at WHOI
on a pilot project on how libraries and data
centers could work together to provide the
digital backbone for traditional journal publications, ensuring that data sets have appropriate associated metadata and are easily
accessible.
3. The British Oceanographic Data Centre
is working on a pilot project to repackage
existing data holdings into data sets appropriate for assignment of persistent identifiers
to provide a mechanism for concrete links to
scientific publications.
The work flow diagram in Figure 1 will
be revised as scientists, data managers, and
journal editors gain experience from the
pilot projects. Important questions raised by
the ocean science community include the
following:
What should be the details of quality control in data centers? A simple action
would be to ensure that submitted data are
machine readable. Other actions might be to
ensure that data sets include a minimal set
of metadata.
What happens to data associated with
articles that are not published? Such data
may still be valuable to other scientists, and
archiving should ensure that the data originator receives appropriate credit.
What processes will be needed to
ensure that data are archived, assigned a
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persistent identifier, and accessible before
the associated paper is published? The timing surrounding the implementation of this
process is especially important as publication times become faster and review drafts
of papers become available through electronic publishing.
What are the rights and responsibilities
of data archives during the review process,
in terms of data release, data protection, timing, etc.?
What existing persistent identifier
should be assigned to data referenced in
journal articles? Digital object identifiers
(DOIs) have become an almost de facto
standard in journal publishing, but other
options exist. Whichever identifier is used,
the issue of the “least publishable unit”
for assignment of an identifier must be
tackled.
More details about the SCOR/IODE activity are available at http://​w ww​.iode​.org/​
­datapublishing. The authors welcome
input on this topic from the geosciences
community.
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Reference
Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research/­
International Oceanographic Data and Information Exchange (SCOR/IODE) (2008), SCOR/IODE
workshop on data publishing: IOC Project Office
for IODE, Oostende, Belgium, 17–18 June 2008,
Workshop Rep. 207, 23 pp., United Nations Educ.,
Sci., and Cult. Organ., Paris.
—Roy Lowry, British Oceanographic Data Centre, Liverpool, UK; Ed Urban, Scientific Committee
on Oceanic Research, University of Delaware,
Newark; and Peter Pissierssens, United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s
Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission
Project Office for the International Oceanographic
Data and Information Exchange, Oostende, Belgium; E-mail: p​.­pissierssens@​­unesco​.org